M&G Electronic Prepress

Electronic Prepress:
PDF Files

Portable Document Format (PDF) files are a very efficient way to submit your text files for printing. There are some guidelines to follow in preparing your PDFs. It is important to select a postscript printer driver as your output device in your Macintosh chooser or Windows printer settings prior to creating PDF files. If your text contains any halftones, they should be adjusted in Photoshop to compensate for the dot-gain we incur on our presses. Highlight and shadow values should follow the values listed in our scanning guidelines. Once the PDF file is created, these halftone values cannot be adjusted.

Acrobat Distiller has many job option settings. We encourage you to contact a Preflight Specialist or your Account Representative to make sure your compression settings are configured correctly to produce useable PDF files. Acrobat users can request our job options file via e-mail. Once dropped into the “settings” folder in the “distiller” folder of your Acrobat software, this file configures all your job options automatically. You simply select “M & G settings” in the opening job options bar of Distiller.

If you have the free downloadable Acrobat software, you will possess only the Acrobat Reader which allows you only to view PDF files. In order to create PDFs, you need to purchase the entire Acrobat suite which includes Distiller. The PDF file is simply produced by opening a postscript file in Distiller. Several application programs allow you to produce PDF files directly as exports. The intermediate postscript is written in the background transparently using this feature.

It is important for you to open and check your PDF files after performing the Distiller function. You will be responsible for problems which occur through this process. The PDF file should be checked for proper font embedding as well as making sure all graphics appear embedded and at the correct resolution. To check your fonts, look under File/Document Info/Fonts. All fonts should be listed as being “embedded” or “embedded subset.” If any other font names appear as substitutes in the font info table, the fonts used in your application file are not properly embedded and will be substituted when printed. In most cases, you will not be able to see the font substitution on screen as Acrobat tries to render the fonts correctly using multi-master technology.

If properly prepared, the PDF file is a wonderfully manageable innovation. It is much smaller in size than a postscript file and can easily be e-mailed or posted to our File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site. Please contact your account representative for a current user name and password for accessing the FTP site. If sending PDFs in this way, we ask that they not be “compressed” or “stuffed” as the PDF is already a compression format. The file integrity will be sacrificed by compressing additionally.

We still prefer to prepare covers from your application files. From time to time, we must make adjustments to individual elements of the cover to obtain accurate spine bulk and bleeds. We also must work within the CMYK printing model. Please be sure that black is CMYK black. RGB black runs the risk of printing with screens. These adjustments are able to be accomplished most easily from your application files.

As with any “newer” software, we deal with many customers at all levels of the learning curve and we are only a phone call away from assisting you in preparing files in this exciting format! We encourage first time customers or those that have specific concerns to prepare a chapter or section of your text in PDF format as a test. Feel free to contact a Preflight Specialist or your Account Representative to arrange the test. After reviewing your files, a preflight specialist will reply with an evaluation.